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Pet hate idioms used by railway enthusiasts


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8 minutes ago, bike2steam said:

'Jinty' was the MR class 1322 0-4-0ST,  the LMS 3F was 'Jocko' at many sheds but at Watford, and some crews at Willesden were known as 'Dobbins', and, as someone's already mentioned, 'Barclays' on the old S&DJR ( well the one that ran from Bath/Burnham on Sea to Bournemouth).

 

Bagnalls on the S&DJR.

 

Barclay didn't build any.

 

 

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3 hours ago, Clive Mortimore said:

Hi

 

I fully agree, the term that should be used is Overhead Line Equipment (OLE, there is no H in the middle). The catenary wire (with the curve ) is the support wire trying to maintain the correct height above the rails of the contact wire. A catenary curve is a mathematically calculated one not a natural one.

 

Post are mast.

 

Gantries are portals.

 

1142516037_partscantilever.png.6cb383f0c45641a7a1854fd4a035ef13.png

 

 

y = cosh (x) if I recall correctly? Or was it sinh? Anyway, a catenary curve is that which a chain adopts, when supported at both ends, with no load on it. I loved doing hyperbolic functions at college, but can't remember it now.

 

In the mobile telephony world, a mast is stayed with cables. What most people refer to as a phone mast is usually a tower or monopole.

 

Edit:- it is y = cosh (x). I managed to dig one of my maths course books out and revise.

Do I get off detention, sir?

Edited by rodent279
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7 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

Bagnalls on the S&DJR.

 

Barclay didn't build any.

 

 

Ah, 'well spotted Wilson', a senile mistake, now altered.:sungum:

Edited by bike2steam
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Shunting locos were known as dobbins because they replaced the horse in many places for shunting.  Jocko was the man who rode the horse, the jockey. As for Jinty, I refer you to the answers given by the Rt Hon friends above. :) 

 

American railroad depot, pronounced deepoh, not as the French Depot. 

 

Meanwhile let's not get started on "control". The driver is in conTROL of the train. The controller is in CONtrol.

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I once had to secondman a train of engines from Rugby to Crewe, can't remember the CONsist, but it was an electric loco pulling another 4 or 5 dead electric locos. I had to ride on the back engine in case of a breakaway and apply the handbrake. As it was winter it was rather a cold journey. I can't remember either what the TOPS list described it as .

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12 hours ago, DLT said:

I hate "Train Station" but it seems to be a broadcast media phrase.  Its less syllables than Railway Station, so does that make it easier to say?

 

Fewer syllables, while we're at it. You can count them.

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It irks me when so called know it all’s insist on calling a yellow aspect “amber”.  Being a former railway man, the yellow aspect has always been yellow and if you were in the training school and called it amber, you’d get severely “b*****ked and if they repeat it again, there was the threat of being thrown off the course.

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1 hour ago, Oldddudders said:

One of the Dutch instructors said you can dismantle anything - because someone must have mantled it! 

That, in its way is correct.

Dismantle is the opposite of mantle as in to cover or cloak something.

 

The problem with English is that it is a very fluid language that is constantly changing.

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22 minutes ago, melmerby said:

That, in its way is correct.

Dismantle is the opposite of mantle as in to cover or cloak something.

 

It may be dismantle or it may be datmantle but they're all gas mantles and therefore components of lamps, as we've learned.

 

Not to be confused with Hilary Mantel who is a chimneypiece.

Edited by Compound2632
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On 09/06/2021 at 11:00, ejstubbs said:

 

My pet hate is by no means specific to railway enthusiasts, but it does seem to proliferate on this forum significantly more than on others that I read on a regular basis.  I refer to the use of the contraction "it's" in place of the third person singular neuter possessive "its".  I know, I know, it's picky and pedantic but it always and without fail causes me to hesitate over the meaning as I'm reading before I recognise that I've just tripped over yet another occurrence of the error.  It's almost as if my brain has to go back and apply a mental highlighter every time I come across it.

 

It's not really the same as having two terms for the same thing e.g. Jinty vs Fowler 0-6-0T.  It's a word (or a contraction in this case) that means something different to what the writer intended - like "loose" instead of "lose", or "lead" instead of "led".

 

Their is one contributor on hear whose particularly prone to this, to the extent that sometimes I don't even read they're posts because I fear the rough mental ride I'm going to get.  (See what I did there?)

I think  this error is much the same as the greengrocer's apostrophe: as in apple's and banana's. When editing my society's quarterly Journal I spend quite a lot of time excising both, sometimes to the point of just putting 's  into a Word search to find where the greengrocers have been busy.  Needless to say, I sometimes find that the purveyor of plural vegetables was me!

I'm not generally pedantic about English: attempting to set our dynamic language in stone, as the Paris establishment try to do with French, is about as fruitful as herding cats. I'd prefer people to write at all than not to write for fear of making grammatical errors and a post here is not the same as a published work. What does annoy me is the muddying of the distinct meanings of similar words by professional wordsmiths who should know better. That does gradually rob us of some of the subtlety of language: uninterested and disinterested are another good example. 

 

Though I don't particularly like it, I accept that "train station" is now an accepted usage in British English and it does have a definite meaning. It probably was an Americanism but so was "turnout", which the PW tribe insist we should use instead of points while objecting with equal rigour to any use of the word "frog". I absolutely refuse to call pointwork "switch and crossing work" because it's so clumsy and, in terms of good English, that offends me far more than the odd misplaced apostrophe.  

Edited by Pacific231G
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Surprised this hasn't come up yet: "kettle" as an oh-so-amusing term for a steam locomotive.  Often used by the same people who think that they are the first people ever to observe that a preserved steam locomotive is like "Trigger's broom". 

 

That said, I recently saw someone in RMWeb-land call a steam locomotive a "teapot", which doesn't even make sense as an insult: at least a kettle actually does boil water. 

Edited by RichardT
Spelling "RMWeb" correctly.....
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11 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

12 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

What else are forums for?

Fora, shirley?

No, the plural  "forums" is fine. If you're using a foreign word (such as one from Latin or Ancient Greek) that hasn't been adopted into the English language then it may be appropriate to use its native plural form along with any accents. Once it's become an accepted English word, as forum certainly has, then it normally - though not always- takes the conventional English plural form. "Appendices" as the plural of "appendix" is an obvious exception but Appendixes would be awkward.

Insisting on using Latin plurals for established English words is the sort of pretentious nonsense that certain politicians use to hide their shallowness. There is also no need for Fred's Cafe to be Fred's Café. 

 

And don't call me Shirley.

Edited by Pacific231G
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3 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

No, the plural  "forums" is fine. If you're using a foreign word (such as one from Latin or Ancient Greek) that hasn't been adopted into the English language then it may be appropriate to use its native plural form along with any accents. Once it's become an accepted English word, as forum certainly has, then it normally - though not always- takes the conventional English plural form. "Appendices" as the plural of "appendix" is an obvious exception but Appendixes would be awkward.

Insisting on using Latin plurals for established English words is the sort of pretentious nonsense that certain politicians use to hide their shallowness. There is also no need for Fred's Cafe to be Fred's Café. 

 

And don't call me Shirley.

Fred's Caff, shirley?????

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The BBC and various other deliberately ignorant media organisations…..”the freight carriages have derailed”….”the engine” (when describing any leading or front vehicle in a train, usually a unit)….”the passenger train derailed, with the wagons tipping over”….”the train driver ‘jumped’ the red light”…..”where it goes round a bend in the track” (when describing a curve).

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8 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

It probably was an Americanism but so was "turnout", which the PW tribe insist we should use instead of points

 

I find this one interesting. I’ve worked professionally in signalling for twenty years but I don’t recall hearing anyone ever calling it a turnout until I joined this forum. I’m not denying that turnout is the official term (at least as far as the Track department are concerned), but I’ve only ever heard them called “points”. Probably there are regional variations?

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As one of the Professional Pway Tribe, yep it is Points, but normally simple Points are described as having a left hand or a right hand turnout. Turnout from the Main Route.
 

But I believe Points is a generic term or description because there is also P&C (Points and Crossings) and S&C (Switches and Crossings). I prefer S&C, but that is just my personal preference.

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9 hours ago, RichardT said:

Surprised this hasn't come up yet: "kettle" as an oh-so-amusing term for a steam locomotive.  Often used by the same people who think that they are the first people ever to observe that a preserved steam locomotive is like "Trigger's broom". 

 

That said, I recently saw someone in RWWeb-land call a steam locomotive a "teapot", which doesn't even make sense as an insult: at least a kettle actually does boil water. 

Sounds like it's time to call electrics "dodgems." :)

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At an eco-building course I went on many years ago in West London, the tutor and many of the attendees kept using the word subsistence instead of subsidence. It really REALLY bugged me, especially as this was a course on building, not trying to survive.

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And when I went to college, we were taught that you cast items in a mold. The thing you do not want in your house is mould.

Yet many people seem to want to cast their resin models in a fungus.

 

I know I'll get a lot of pushback on this, as many dictionaries now use the American spelling and this seems to have permeated into the UK lexicon more, to the extent that I would not be surprised to see that the OED have interchanged both, but I come from Ireland and that's my excuse!

 

(It doesn't help that this forums' spell-checker puts a little red wiggly line under 'mold' to suggest that the word does not exist).

 

Edit #1:

Ok, I'm out on a limb here. As I said, some dictionaries define both mold and mould interchangably, and it's what I recall from college in Ireland many decades ago.

 

Edit #2.

Glad to have been informed that the spell-checker is a browser function, and not a forum function. Browser now updated, which helps elsewhere.

 

Happy to be corrected.

 

Edited by Damo666
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2 minutes ago, Damo666 said:

(It doesn't help that this forums' spell-checker puts a little red wiggly line under 'mold' to suggest that the word does not exist).

 

That's your browser, not the forum.

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The inability, of the press especially, to know the difference between 'Flying Scotsman' (the loco) and 'The Flying Scotsman' (the train).

e.g. 'The Flying Scotsman is the most famous steam train in the world' then go on to describe the locomotive.

 

Another similar to this is adding 'The..' to a locomotive name that doesn't have it e.g. 'The Mallard'

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